I think we all have those crazy zombie contingency plans. Actually, I have my own plan. I'm a Romero nut who really loved Night of the Living Dead. You watch enough zombie movies, you have to have a zombie contingecy plan. I'd hide the family in the attic and go get adecent RV, like the one in Zombieland, then I'd pick them up and head west. Rural places would be the best places. But I don't think I'd kidnap some kid.

I hope this story doesn't make people with contingecy plans all seem like dangerous wackos. Unless they have iceberg contogency plans. Those guys are way out there;-)

I don't think that soap went to prison for stealing art. I don't think there is a painting. I see the painting as a metaphor for that dark, fuzzy, misaligned part of his soul that he can't grasp, and he certainly can't get others to grasp. Perhaps his sister keeping the painting for two years is simply an allusion to her keeping some foul secret of his, or knowing more about him than anyone else.

I think that he went to prison for kidnapping and killing children (if he went to prison at all). Asking about a "zombie contingency plan" is simply a way of testing out what is someones best defense when people like Soap come around.

Soap lied to every single person and every single moment, so I found stealing the child at the end a very plausible part of his character.

On a different note: I think this was more of a psuedopod story, although, i suppose if I had been expecting horror, the O-Henry ending wouldn't have been so fantastic.

I may be mis-representing the spelling, but it was a genre of short stories from the turn of the century that would have a weird twist in the last sentence or two - would really come out of left field to the reader, but wasn't so far gone that it wasn't plausable.

I learned that they were called oh O-Henry stories because the author (and perhaps subsequent copycat authors) would publish them under the name O. Henry, but also because the twist at the end was meant to solicit an "oh, Henry!" response; the turn of the century equivalent to "WTF?"

The Gift of the Magi is one, and I think the Lottery might be another (at least of the genre, if not the original author)

This wasn't really an O. Henry ending. O. Henry specialized in ironic twists, like a woman selling her hair to buy a chain for her husband's watch and her husband selling his watch to buy combs for his wife's lovely hair, or a character claiming they will die when the last leaf falls from the tree in their yard and their painter neighbor painting a leaf onto the side of the house where the invalid can see it from their window and thus keeping them alive, or a man stealing money bit by bit from the bank where he works and hiding it in a hole in the wall only to find that the shopkeeper on the other side of the hole has been finding mysterious free money in her cabinets for years. This wasn't an ironic twist ending; it was just a sharp veer to the left.

"The Lottery" is Shirley Jackson. I guess if twist endings make a story an "O. Henry" story, it could be considered one, but the tone is very dissimilar from O. Henry's gentle (if somewhat wry) tales (he's kind of like Damon Runyan but less broad) - he wrote about a broad range of classes in America, and served a jail sentence early in his life.

"The Cop and the Anthem" by O. Henry made quite an impression on me as a kid, as did "The Last Leaf" and "The Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen". "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief" are probably his most familiar stories (they used to make kids read them in school, and it's a sad day if that isn't done anymore as O. Henry is a perfect way to get kids to love short fiction).

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry), his pseudonym was constructed for ease of rememberance for readers, although Guy Davenport posits that its a reduction of "Ohio Penetentiary", where he first started writing.

I may be mis-representing the spelling, but it was a genre of short stories from the turn of the century that would have a weird twist in the last sentence or two - would really come out of left field to the reader, but wasn't so far gone that it wasn't plausable.

The jail sentence was a real touchstone for him, really, even if it wasn't exactly hard time for hard crimes, per se. His writing reflected a lot of "we're all just people" and "everybody makes mistakes" themes.

"The Cop and the Anthem" by O. Henry made quite an impression on me as a kid, as did "The Last Leaf" and "The Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen". "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief" are probably his most familiar stories (they used to make kids read them in school, and it's a sad day if that isn't done anymore as O. Henry is a perfect way to get kids to love short fiction).

I don't think I'm familiar with the others, but The Ransom of Red Chief was filmed as one of those Saturday Morning Specials programs when I was a kid. I haven't read it, but I thought the show version was pretty funny.

Outstanding reading by Norm Sherman. I enjoyed how the story and dialog progressed, and the clever lines like "drop a weasel in it". But like most everyone else here I was lost by the ending. And without an ending I can understand I cannot add this to my favorites, but I really loved the story and narration right up to the ending.

I know it is way late to comment on this story, but I loved it!I love how the main character's name kept switching casually. "Wolverine said"! I loved the way the story felt real and unreal at the same time, and the mystery of the painting... Is he crazy or not... Yeah he is really crazy... Makes me feel better about myself.

It's never too late to comment on a story. Unblinking is making it his personal mission to comment on every backstory in Escape Pod's catalogue, and he's going in the order of Least Recently Commented-Upon (the little-known LRCU algorithm ).

Logged

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham

It's never too late to comment on a story. Unblinking is making it his personal mission to comment on every backstory in Escape Pod's catalogue, and he's going in the order of Least Recently Commented-Upon (the little-known LRCU algorithm ).

Yup! The Way-Back Machine had been falling into disuse, but now it's running smoothly again from my frequent trips.

Was anyone else reminded of Denis Johnson's "Two Men" short story? It's up at the New Yorker fiction podcast. I think this story similarly has an unfolding and strange narrator that gets more disturbing as it goes, in a delicious way.